The present disclosure relates to three dimensional (3D) fonts, and more particularly, to use of 3D fonts on a computer device.
Fonts define the visual appearance of text glyphs, which have typically been static two dimensional (2D) definitions, or more recently 2D definitions with pre-defined animations. The appearance of text is generally defined by font files (e.g., Calibri, Arial). To this day, fonts only define a 2D appearance (either static or with pre-defined animations). For each text glyph, there is no interactive or three dimensional (3D) behavior. Applications are free to manipulate and animate text themselves, such as changing the color or spinning each letter. Applications can also make the text appearance change dynamically depending on real time inputs, such as mouse/touch, accelerometer, and other sensors. However, this behavior is completely defined and controlled by the application. In addition, applications must use a separate 3D rendering system to display 3D text. Thus, 3D assets are packaged separately from the font data, generally, within the application.
Currently, there is no standard way to represent or transmit 3D animation or dynamic rendering data for text, meaning that every application must build its own proprietary system for rendering interactive text. For applications that share raw text (e.g., a string of characters without additional markup or metadata) with other applications, such as messaging services that follow an open standard (e.g., SMS), or copy+paste clipboard scenarios in any operating system, there is no way to represent additional rendering information in the raw text string. As such, the richer appearance and animations are lost when viewing the content in a third party application.
Thus, there is a need in the art for improvements in 3D fonts.